Google, Bing, and Yahoo! can find a lot of things on the internet, but they cannot find everything. When you need to find specialised resources online, it is best to turn to specialised search engines - ones that are designed to hone in on certain types of documents, files, or information and retrieve them with the least amount of hassle. Here are a few.
-Sounds
The internet is filled with both words and sounds, but finding the sounds is not so easy - unless you use >FindSounds.com. With this unique search tool, you can find everything from the sound of a crowded street corner to the sound of one hand clapping. You can play most of the sounds directly from the search results page, but you can also download sounds, e-mail them, tweet them or find similar sounds with one click.
FindSounds is international, too, coming in flavours for seven languages.
-Movies
There is movie information scattered all over the internet. But if you are a movie lover, you will probably find more of what you want in the warehouse of movie information known as the >Internet Movie Database (IMDb). IMDb houses the usual fare of actor biographies, movie synopses, and reviews. But it also gives movie fans their fill of news, videos, trailers, and upcoming attractions. As if that were not enough, visitors can keep each other company on the site’s message boards, where thousands of visitors discuss every imaginable topic related to films.
-Freeware
The internet is all about downloadable software, but finding it is an exercise in frustration if what you are after is software that is free, with no strings attached. >SourceForge.net should be your first stop if you are looking for open-source software, which by definition is free and usually of good quality. Other freeware you will find through repositories such as >TotallyFreeWare.org and >NoNags .
-News
The big three search engines-Google, Bing, and Yahoo-now each include a “news” link right on their main page to make finding news items, relatively easy. But there is still a place for search engines specialising in retrieving news and only news. Among them, >NewsLink is one of the best.
NewsLink not only defaults to searching news when you type a search query. It also provides handy links to major newspapers and news outlets throughout most of the world. Handy categories include radio/TV news, magazines, breaking news, and news broken down into typical categories such as “business.”
-Images
The major search engines are now a great way to find images tucked away online. Just click the “image” link on Google, Yahoo!, or Bing to browse to your heart’s content. If you need more, though, add >Picsearch , >exalead , and >Pixsy to your bookmark list.
- Social networks
The major search engines still do not do a great job of searching the vast stores of information on today’s social networking sites. But >48ers does. Social networking sites- everything from Twitter to the myriad forums on every topic imaginable - have transformed the web in many ways, not least because they provide a flow of information that is constantly updated. 48ers’ “real time search” focuses on those sites, where information is continually updated. Type a search term and you will get not just some stored or cached data that may be months old, but rather the latest mentions of whatever you searched for.
Add these sites to your bookmarks list, and you will go well beyond what you can find in Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. You probably would not use them every day, but when you need them, they will be indispensible.
